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I have often wondered if part of the reason we as a culture are slowly going crazy is because we have crammed most of our festivals into a 4ish month period, beginning with Halloween and then ending with either the Super Bowl or Valentines Day depending on your personal brand of weirdness.
I think we’ve messed up in cramming most of the holy days into 1/3 of the year.
Feasting is a discipline as much as any other. I don’t mean overeating, although some of us are highly skilled in that discipline.
Feasting is something else. A feast is a regularly scheduled celebration, but it is more than just celebrating. A feast is also a time of sacrifice, when we give more back to God and more to each other. Note that extra verse I threw in there. Being more thankful in November does not make our regular tithes and offerings a feast sacrifice. This is something beyond that discipline, something additional.
And while we are called to sacrifice, we are also called to relish the good gifts of God. These are deeply tied together. We are sacrificing from what God has given. It is a sacrifice today but it is rooted in the knowledge that God will still be around tomorrow and will still be taking care of us.
It is sacrifice, it is celebrating, but it is also about telling the stories.
This part I think we do fairly well at during our feast-athon. Thanksgiving and Christmas make it easy, we know what stories to go to. We can find those passages in our Bibles pretty easily, and they are enjoyable stories to tell and to hear.
But, when was the last time we told the stories that aren’t in the Biblical canon? When do we set aside regularly scheduled time to tell the stories of our cancer survivors ringing the bell? When do we tell the stories of bills getting paid and relationships being restored? When do we tell our kids the stories of how their parents met, their grandparents met, their great grandparents met? When do we tell our kids the stories of when we were wrong but were shown grace and forgiveness?
So many of the holy days we do have get spent on preparation and recovery, are we actually setting aside days and weeks to purposely sacrifice and worship AND feast and tell the story?
Rev. Chesna Riley
Minister to Families, Children, and Youth
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